Creating Software, Hardware, and Community

(I am going to again try to resurrect this blog for 2017. )
For a long time, I’ve struggled to keep an eye on how my life is going, to steer it just a little, but mostly to follow and remember where I have been, and what I have been doing.

There are still times when in conversation I mention ‘Then I started a housing Cooperative’ and I think *oh shit. I actually did that? I had forgotten I did that’ for me, a lot of resolutions and plans are as much about remember where I have been, as they are about mapping where I could go.

Objective and Key Results (OKR’s) is a habit I’ve used on and off at work. Less useful than sprints, more useful than serious planning, they have a decent balance of laying out some good solid goals to feel excited about, and picking a few small metric to follow it with. There are a few good posts on personal OKR’s out there.

If things go well, I may post OKR’s here to follow up on. Good luck to everyone in 2017.

So, in an ongoing life-long problem of deciding what to blog and what not to, I am spinning most of my technical content out into a new blog, ‘IoT Best Practices‘. Other than the multitude of ways I misspell both ‘Best’ and ‘Practices’ I think it will be best for me, and for my work, to have these things spun-out separately. I may cross-post from time to time, but I want to slightly firewall my thoughts and personal life from professional work.

I do expect future workplaces will stalk me on my personal website (Hello future investors/funders/employers!) and judge me for it. But at least now I can wave my hands and say ‘This isn’t the blog content you were looking for’ and point them to something more relevant.

Working at BuLogics, Inc. means that I work in a BYOD* environment. I see a lot of people in that kind of scenerio that can’t stop checking their personal info/email/docs at work, or who can’t close out or shut down work projects with it’s 9PM and time to watch some Netflix. To avoid that in my own life, I set up two users on my laptop. One user is for me personally, where I keep personal data, private info, and my life. The other is a work-user, where I keep work data, files, and info.

OSX, to a lot of it’s credit, works pretty well as a multi-user system. Permissions are well handled, and for the most part things work great. I have had a few problems with USB devices that I leave in the device as I switch users, and a few very weird edge-case situations. But mostly, Apple did their job, and OSX just works.

I woke up this morning a bit bleary, and got ready to go to work. I got my things together and got into the car for my drive to work. Have you ever woken up, and something that was normal stands out? Woken-up to suddenly be aware, once again, of the surreality of the world around you? I had one of those mornings, and what was so surreal was the cars.

Blocks, and blocks of the city, lined, packed, jam-filled with automobiles. Bumper to bumper, spilling out into the empty street, crowding streets, blocking sidewalks, and just ridiculous. How can we need this many cars? Are we really so poorly organized we need a 1/2-ton hunk of mechanics and electronics in front of almost every house? Who are the fat cats sleeping in their 300 thread-count sheets in a beautiful mansion, who have sold us all on needing one of these things?

Now, I get it. Ironic, right. I’m driving to work, and being amazed at all the cars. But seriously, I live a block from a trolly-stop. I’ve use transit to commute 2 days a week, but drive a couple to balance out the (frankly) overly-long commute time.

When I do drive to work, I drive about 6 miles to work, and 5 of those miles of that are lined with cars. Bumper to bumper. Machine, after machine, after machine, after machine. A parade of empty husks, sitting there rusting, wearing out, and wasting space. There are just so so many of them. It’s amazing. How much money must be poured into buying them, maintaining them? Paving parking lots for them? Who is profiting from them? What a great case of a locally optimal, but globally dumb decision result.

Deb Chachra has a great article ‘Why I am not a Maker’ If you bother to read this site, I suggest you all go read it now, since this post is a continuation of that conversation. It’s a good and fast read, bit a bit scatter-shot. Done? Good!

My first take at adding to the discussion was mostly a list of sections of her article I disagreed with. But that was pretty crappy to read, and a crappy thing to do. Especially given how much of her general idea that I agree with, even if I disagree with the details.

My second take was to outline where I agree and/or disagree, or just don’t know where I stand yet. That was very long and tired and kind of hair-splitty for my taste. Really, just a bunch of overly complicated footnotes to the article.

This here is my third take at contributing to the discussion, and I’m going at it in a totally new (to me) way. I’m going to assume for the rest of this article that Deb is 100% correct, and is a perfect reliable witness. Take that, mix it with my own political/social point of view, and what conclusions would I then draw? I come up with 3 idea:

Maker culture is deep into the late cycle of co-option by market system(s).

Maker culture is American sub-culture, and by trying to be ‘apolitical’ is just generic./li>

Maker culture is has become a self-aggrandizing big-tent Evangelical culture.

Co-Option: Put a ‘Maker’ on it !

The ‘Maker’ culture is being ‘green’ed. By ‘Greened’ I mean, it’s reach the point where it’s meaningless in it’s generality, and is just glued onto crap by people trying to sound like they have a clue. Glued into job posting, events. Stores cough Radio Shack cough using it to sell crap, it’s flavor of the month, like weird eggplants a few years ago, and the ‘Green’ label that is slapped on anything and everything. Thank you marketing and the desire for social/cultural capital for sucking the meaning out of a once useful term!

Evangelical : YOU MUST LOVE JESUSCODE

I love the section on the forced embrace of ‘I make BLAH’ nametags. It reminds me of the you-must-hug-us greeters at a lot of Evangelical churches growing up. It’s imagined as an attempted to be welcoming. It turns into a giant awkward turn-off, and in reality provides more comfort the hugger than the victim. Everyone must Code. Everyone must love Jesus. Democracy Will Work For You, Or We Shoot!

In reality, I don’t agree with a lot of what Deb said. I think a lot of her specifics are wrong, and that she mashes maker culture into startup culture. But for all the details I disagree on, don’t want to invalidate her overall point, or to undermine her experience, both of which I agree are spot-on. (And her awesome advice-to-younger-self is also spot on).

The Maker movement has shifted away from it’s scrappy rebellion stage, and large sections of it are building Start Destroyers, or just too busy buying TARDIS trinkets at Barnes and Noble to notice as the local mom&pop PC store is bulldozed over.

I think the US has stopped valuing education to a large extent. Sure, we still ask for a degree on all kinds of paperwork and jobs. But in reality we don’t value those credentials much. How did we get to this point? I have a (untested) theory.

When looking to hire people, I see a lot of resume’s and almost all of them have some kind of degree. And really, the degree’s don’t matter. Except for a few key schools, candidate without degrees are actually more interesting, since they are taking (or took) a risk to get into the pool.

I can imagine at some point in the past a B.S. or M.S. on a resume indicated a certain level of skill, and some assumptions about what a person would know, or could do. But not anymore. I know many college freshman (as interns or hires) who know or do better than people with 3-4 years more experience than regular interviewee’s with C.S. degrees. Not to name names, but knowing someone went through Drexel’s Co-Op system (which is an amazing system) is a much better indication of young success than a degree from most other colleges. Most degrees don’t indicate any level of skill, or do well to predict workplace success.

The lions share of blame falls to the college/university system themselves. In a hunt for money to build better buildings universities have taken a lot of crap, and put out a lot of crap. It has happened since most colleges are lusting after lucre to become real-estate moguls, by leveraged on sub-market credit of student loans. Teachers don’t get raises, but old buildings get razed then rebuilt. But I digress.

In order to grow, much of higher education have dropped the bar so low, it’s a tripping hazard. In the universal conflict between ‘excellent’ and ‘big’ they chose big, and lowered their standards. Lowering their standards for a short term boost is dragging themselves down, and undermining the trust they use to have in American culture. I think most modern unions suffer from the same problem. The same dynamic has killed consumer product companies, and it can kill whole sectors by destroying trust.

We don’t value higher education, because it has stopped valuing itself.

I was pretty amazed when I came by to check my own site, and discovered I’d not posted since this summer. With a toddler (herein referred to as Chestnut), a lot of work, and house problems, keeping a website up to date has been a non-priority. Almost a negative priority. For about a years, I’ve gotten my to-do list reminders ‘Update your website’ and ignored them. Which, in hindsight, it and was the right answer given priorities.

It’s a new year, and as per convention, I’m going to throw down some resolutions:

Underpromise and Overdeliver

Get in a weekly rhythm

Re-engage in community/social life

Fire-up some side projects

Dom soem self-maintaince/improvement

I have a more detailed list personally, but I’m not going to post all of the gory details here.

I try to pay attention to the meaning of holiday. I know for a lot of folks Memorial Day, 4th of July, and a lot of our holiday’s are just another day off. One more chance to sleep late, maybe
watch or play with some fireworks, and enjoy friends, family, and food. Sure I’m being a curmudgeon, and maybe people aren’t really like that. I want to take some time during the day to think and talk about what it’s all about. For a workaholic nation, what makes something important enough to stop work?

The 4th of July is celebration of our Declaration of Independence. The fledgling united State of America had already be at war with Britin for about a year, when the continental congress drew up and approved a resolution stating *why* we had gone to war. The document is a pretty nice mix of international law, Natural Philosophy, and outright PR. You should read it, it’s a pretty good read.

So what does that mean, to me, in 2014?

I think a lot of it speaks to me of the history of high ideals of the USA, as well as our consistant inability to live up to them, and our blindness to stew of ironic contradictions that we live in.

– Our Declaration of Independence was written by a slave owner. And even then, sections of *his* anti-slavery text were removed to make the document more palatable.

– As we sit here, and celebrate the 4th of July, we are also discovering that NSA ‘targeted Surveillance’ means ‘Anyone that searched for Linux, TOR, Tails is having all of their web traffic logged by the NSA’

– Despite our ideals that all people are created equal, we bomb wedding parties, families, and houses overseas, and hid our manslaughter of fellow humans under euphemisms like ‘Collateral Damage’.

– We speak of ideas of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. But as a culture and a nation our true values are driven by money, celebrity, and money.

– We talk about democracy, and self-governance. But we have propped up, and continue to create or support, dictators and despots when it suits our needs.

– Despite our talk of self-reliance, the oil that is the lifeblood of our country, and so much of our consumer goods come from overseas.

– We have allowed money to infect our political system to the point where the only people that can run, are those that can suck up to huge diners to fund their campaign.

– Our original sins as a country, slavery of millions and genocide of the civilizations that were already on this contentent, and seldom acknowledged or discussed, even though their fallout is still felt by americans today.

The United States is a great country, and I love it to death. But it’s a flawed country, right to it’s roots. I grew up hearing a lot of rhetoric about “Hate the sin, but Love the sinner”. I know, I’m ranting a bit here. I’m being a curmudgeon and a downer, I’ll knock it off.

Enjoy the 4th. Celebrate all we have done, and celebrate the high ideas we espoused as we as a country took our first steps on the world stage. But as you’re watching the fireworks and celebrating the great things we have done as a country, don’t let that drive you to mistakes we have make as well.

I often get stuck writing essay’s, since I come up with counter-arguments as I go. I’ve always admired Darwin’s writing style, in that he builds a nearly airtight case from bottom to top, all the while making it clear where is is estimating, where he is fudging detail (and willing to admit or discuss it) or where he is generalizing, and *why* that generalization is a good place to start.

In the last year, I’ve written a lot less than I’d like to. I have in my task-tracker to write a weblog post twice a week, but between the new job, a young kid, and life I’ve really not had the time. Which is to say, I’ve had time to write, but not time to go back, and re-edit articles to be as airtight as I want (which is still, well, not so air-tight).

In 2014, I’m going to get back on the train to write more often. I’ll be leaving wikipedia style superscript[1] notations where I’ve skipped detail, or where I have to admit some details need refining. Maybe I’ll get back to those articles to edit and refactor, maybe I won’t. But at least I will get the ideas out there, and into the world.

There is a great post on the website The Street with Peter Semmelhack of Bug Labs, on why hardware is hard. I’ll wait here while you go read it…. Disclaimer: I worked for Bug Labs on ’09-’10. I dig Peter’s vision and experience.

Bug Labs Hardware Engineering an adventure for 2013 that played out around 2007 to 2011, part of which I was there for the last two years of. At the time, their software system was growing well and with the industry, while the Hardware/Firmware development was, frankly, a black-hole of engineering time suck.

For the time I was there, things were a bit rocky, and the realization the hardware vision was nigh impossible was a tough vision change to make. Pluggable complex engineering is absurdly hard, for engineering reasons I’ll get into below. Peter did a great job of herding the company onto a new path, It’s great to see Bug has pivoted to a place where it vision is technically possible, and is having great success.

Given that, It was a surprise to me this month to read about Project Aria and PhoneBlox. Two admirable projects that sound great as YouTube videos, but projects that are none the less destine to a die via death-by-a-million-solder-burns. It was pretty sad to see that hubris (Motorola) and lack of domain knowledge (PhoneBlox) leading well intentioned people down a rocky road.

A road to a black-hole that other companies, like Bug Labs and Open Moko, had already mapped out with giant warning signs and ‘Black Hole Ahead’ articles sharing their traumatic experience.

I could write a whole detailed post on each of the red-flags on these projects, and how it overlaps with the insurmountable challenges of Bug Labs Hardware. but I’m going to stick to bullet-points unless I get some reader-request to elaborate on some of these.

To ‘plug together’ a device of phone complexity, you need decades of engineering, or 2-4 years of education. These won’t be accessible outside of trained engineers, or a huge engineering NRE.

Ruggidizing core components while maintaining speed is impossible.The faster, hotter, and smarter you make electronics, the more finicky they are.

If you do ruggidize them, you need slower plug-friendly protocols which are 2 orders of magnitude too slow for modern expectations.

Delay: The open phone tech will always be 6 to 24 months behind the advertised *buy now, we ship next month* phones.

People pay a lot *not* to assemble their own PC’s. DIY PC kits and purchases are a niche of a niche, even amoung nerds and hackers. Seriously, people want to change their wallpaper and font-defaults, not their RAM or front-side-bus.

We’ve been down this road, in projects by Open Moko. Bug Labs, and more. The ‘fully configurable’ system is going to be crash-tastic. It’s great PR, it’s shit engineering.
Imagine the phone as a car-level complexity devices. Changing out the dashboard, or some plastics. or adding a spoiler to a car? Sure, a great idea. Changing out the engine, or suspension, or powertrain really takes a mechanic, or a car so de-tuned it’s worthless on a highway (which is why I loved my Vespa ET3). A few hours of thinking would make it clear the fully-pluggable system is a daydream.

I have more hope for Jolla, built by thoughtful engineers. The ‘plugable’ modules are nice-to-have add-ons and external to the core system. They are a bit isolated, and they are not core components of operation. It’s much more likely to succeed, and they can use isolation circuits and ‘firewall’ the plug-system to a few external pins/ports, rather than ruggidizing a lot of internal connections and parts.

If you want me to expand on any bullet-points, just drop a note in the comments, and I’d be glad to rant on in detail why those are such problems.